A Harvard Scholar on the Enduring Lessons of Chinese Philosophy

Tourists and students at the Temple of Confucius in Beijing standing before a statue of the ancient philosopher whose teachings continue to shape Chinese society.Credit
Jason Lee/Reuters

Since 2006, Michael Puett has taught an undergraduate survey course at Harvard University on Chinese philosophy, examining how classic Chinese texts are relevant today. The course is now one of Harvard’s most popular, third only to “Introduction to Computer Science” and “Principles of Economics.” Mr. Puett and the writer Christine Gross-Loh have distilled the essence of his course into “The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life.” The book has been bought by publishers in 25 countries, including China, where the book will be published this year.

In an interview, Mr. Puett discussed the value of rituals, reading Du Fu as well as Shakespeare, and why embracing your true self is not the answer.

Some Chinese philosophical texts are already very popular in the West. There are innumerable translations, for example, of Laotzu’s Tao Te Ching.

Some of the texts are indeed very popular, but one of my concerns is that they’re often read according to our stereotypes. They are often thought of as “traditional” ideas, focused on teaching us to accord with the world as it is, as opposed to what we like to call “modern” ideas that are focused on liberating us as individuals to decide for ourselves how to live. So-called Confucianism, for example, is read as simply being about forcing people to accept their social roles, while so-called Taoism is about harmonizing with the larger natural world. So Confucianism is often presented as bad and Taoism as good. But in neither case are we really learning from them.

Precisely. They’ve become simply foreign and exotic, made into things that we have nothing to learn from.

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Michael PuettCredit
Margaret Lampert

Is there another risk? That these ideas could be reduced to self-help tips?

A key idea of the book is precisely to oppose that. If we want to take these ideas seriously, we shouldn’t domesticate them to our own way of thinking. When we read them as self-help, we are assuming our own definition of the self and then simply picking up pieces of these ideas that fit into such a vision. So, for example, people sometimes take Taoism as a way to “help me find myself and live well in the world.” But these ideas are not about looking within and finding oneself. They are about overcoming the self. They are, in a sense, anti-self-help.

What is a key idea in China’s philosophical tradition that challenges contemporary assumptions?

Today, we are often told that our goal should be to look within and find ourselves, and, once we do, to strive to be sincere and authentic to that true self, always loving ourselves and embracing ourselves for who we are. All of this sounds great and is a key part of what we think of as a properly “modern” way to live. But what if we’re, on the contrary, messy selves that tend to fall into ruts and patterns of behavior? If so, the last thing we would want to be doing is embracing ourselves for who we are — embracing, in other words, a set of patterns we’ve fallen into. The goal should rather be to break these patterns and ruts, to train ourselves to interact better with those around us.

If we guide people too much, isn’t it paternalism?

Certainly some strains of Chinese political theory will take this vision of the self — that we tend to fall into patterns of behavior — to argue for a more paternalistic state that will, to use a more recent term, “nudge” us into better patterns. But many of the texts we discuss in the book go the other way, and argue that the goal should be to break us from being such passive creatures — calling on us to do things that break us out of these patterns and allow us to train ourselves to start altering our behavior for the better.

You argue that Chinese philosophy views rituals as tools that can liberate us from these ruts.

We tend to think of rituals as things that tell us what to do — to socialize us into certain ways of acting. But several texts we discuss have a very different understanding of ritual. Rituals force us for a brief moment to become a different person and to interact with those around us in a different way. They work because they break us from the patterns that we fall into and that otherwise dominate our behavior.

In the early Han dynasty, for example, we have examples of rituals that called for role reversals. The father would be called upon to play the son, and the son would play the father. Each is forced to see the world from the other’s perspective, with the son learning what it’s like to be in a position of authority and the father remembering what it was like to be the more subservient one.

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Are we at a phase of globalization where ideas that were once considered exotic might be valued as part of our own, broader cultural heritage?

It’s my hope. We tend to think that we live in a globalized world, but in a lot of ways we really don’t. The truth is that for a long time only a very limited number of ideas have dominated the world, while ideas that arose elsewhere were seen as “traditional” and not worth learning from.

But imagine future generations that grow up reading Du Fu along with Shakespeare, and Confucius along with Plato. Imagine that type of world, where great ideas — wherever they arose — are thought about and wrestled with.

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For much of the 20th century, these ideas were actively rejected in China. During the Communist era, the texts were read according to the same stereotypes about traditional thinking that we mentioned before, and the goal was to reject these ideas in order to “modernize” China. Now the government is beginning to embrace these ideas. But, ironically, the ideas are being read according to the same stereotypes. Confucianism is again read as being about keeping people in their place — only now this is seen as a good thing!

So the government wants to co-opt the past. And yet, on the ground in China, we have broader interpretations. People seek the past as answering questions on values.

There’s a very strong debate going on in China about values — a sense that everything has become about wealth and power, and a questioning about whether this should be rethought. And among the ideas that are being brought into the debate are these earlier notions about the self and about how one can lead a good life. So, while the government is appropriating some of these ideas in particular ways, the broader public is debating them, and certainly with very different interpretations. How this will play out is impossible to say, but it is a debate that is worth following very closely.